An Uncommon Starpoint Gemini 2 Review

Today’s review is for a game that I say qualifies as fairly obscure. While not totally unknown, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that this title is not on many gamers’ radars.

I noticed this title in the Xbox Live marketplace (on Xbox One, in case you are wondering. I’ll have more to say about the system itself later) when it was first ported from PC late in 2015; it looked like it might be my kind of game, but seeing that it was digital only and that I was considering selling my Xbox One at the time, I passed on it.

More recently, the game was put on sale, and it caught my eye again. More importantly, there was a free trial that allowed me to play it without plunking down any cash. You see what happens Microsoft? Having demos of games can help you make more sales! Though I wasn’t engaged by the game’s plot or characters, I found the initial gameplay and setting intriguing enough to go ahead with a purchase.

Starpoint Gemini 2, while not aspiring to be a true (or at least truer, if you will) space sim in the vein of Elite: Dangerous or Freelancer, is sufficiently demanding and difficult to ensure that this is not a casual game. Those who are unaccustomed to freeroam, choose your own story type games will feel lost in Gemini, while those expecting to be able to jump in guns blazing will be turned into space dust before they can blink.

Gemini2 plays like a cross between Elite: Dangerous and Star Trek: Legacy, falling somewhere between an arcadey, combat heavy space shooter and a sandbox space exploration game. You’re not going to be asked to perform complex docking maneuvers or calculate how far you can get on what fuel and resources you have available. In Gemini, there is no fuel or crew to micro-manage. You can hire officers to give your ship bonuses, but they aren’t required. Equipment and cargo can be acquired en masse, but aside from your weapon turrets, few of the items you can loot have an affect on the way your ship looks or functions. The ship customization you can perform at any drydock is a nice touch but is ultimately quite limited.

The developers of this title, Little Green Men, espouse that Gemini has extensive RPG elements. From a meta perspective, I can buy into that, seeing as that whether you play campaign or freeroam mode, you really are expected to play the game how you want and forge your own story. But, from a gameplay point of view, the RPG elements are rudimentary. You gain experience and level up, but this yields precious little benefit. Your skill points only affect your powers, not your base abilities. As the class I picked, Gunner, my skill points only did any good on my combat powers, which only last a matter of seconds and then go on a long cooldown. The perk points are more useful as they are passive and always providing benefits, but it still felt like I gained little utility from gaining levels.

The power system is also, quite frankly, sloppier on Xbox One than PC. The UI for PC in Gemini 2 is neat and mostly easy to navigate. There are some menus in the Xbox port that are confusing and not clear on what they are showing you (made worse by the too-small text that is a strain to read even on a large TV), and the power wheels are sloppily mapped, requiring you to hold down the left stick whilst selecting the appropriate face button for your power. Problem is, you also use the left stick to navigate, which means you are always thrown off course when you activate a power. Sometimes this doesn’t matter, but in a heated battle when you are trying to evade enemy fire or keep a certain part of your shields away from incoming projectiles, this is frustrating.

Added to this, while the game is not overly glitchy (especially given its size), there are some inexcusably bad, almost game breaking flaws in a few story missions. Ship to ship combat works fine with only rare problems, but you are forced to attack installations and turrets in a few parts of the story. More often than not, turrets have glitchy hit boxes, meaning that all weapons except beams clip right through them. Had I not been ready with beam weapons on my ship, it would have been impossible for me to progress with the main campaign. I also did have two complete game crashes in my playthrough, but fortunately the frustration from this was minimal due to the game’s solid save system (you can save anywhere as long as you aren’t in combat) and the fact that these crashes occurred in a span of 42 hours. Not too bad, and honestly I think Skyrim crashed on me more times than that is the same number of hours.

Graphically, it is my opinion that Starpoint Gemini 2 looks gorgeous on both Xbox and PC. Both systems do suffer from a bit of loading lag when you move from sector to sector. Often it is easy to forgive, but once in a while the game will simply pause inexplicably for several seconds while the next sector of space is loaded. From what I’ve experienced, the PC version has the graphical edge (assuming that you have the hardware to support it properly) in sheer detail, but the framerate and effects are solid regardless of platform.

That brings me to the category that anyone who knows me, knows I care about immensely: sound. The sound affects, for starters, they’re, well… they’re sound effects. Pretty much standard fare for a sci-fi game. Lots of pew-pew weapons, typical sounding engines, some decent whomps when a projectile strikes your shields. Nothing special but nothing bad either. The voice acting, however… ew. Long gone are the days when the majority of games had either average or poor voice acting. The quality of voiceovers today is simply at a much higher standard than it used to be, so when I hear bad acting now, it is more jarring than ever. Not every voice actor in Gemini 2 is bad, and to be fair some of it is just because the writing is horrendous (it is in my opinion either a poorly edited script or was written by someone whose first language is not English). The story and acting does get better as the story progresses (and there is a cool plot twist that I didn’t expect at all, as well as a surprisingly reflective and thoughtful ending), but it is still just not very good. If the game only offered a campaign with no ability to freeroam between missions, it would score a far lower mark with me.

Lastly, there is the music. And, wow, it is good. It’s just a shame that there is a limited selection of tracks (and only one piece of music for combat), because what’s here is excellent. The mood of the music will probably seem to most like typical sci-fi fare, but it evokes such a nice mix of elements from other series like Battlestar Galactica and Mass Effect that I can’t help but be swept away by it. Along with the heavy use of synth is some very tasteful guitar and bass work.

Ultimately, Starpoint Gemini 2 is not going to win many awards, nor is it likely to ever be a best seller on any platform, but it is a charming, serious enough without going too overboard space sim that is fun to play and gives you a lot of beautiful places to explore (probably too many nebulae and asteroid fields to realistically fit in one star system, a binary one or not, but oh well). If you ever find the game on sale (whether through Steam or Xbox Live) and dig games in the vein of Star Trek: Legacy,Elite: Dangerous, or Freelancer, I think you’ll have some fun with this title.

Story/Setting: C

Graphics: B

Voiceovers/Sound: D

Music: A-

Gameplay: B-

Overall score: C

Fun and entertaining for sci-fi and space fans, but not for everyone. If you need your stories, characters and actors to be engaging and enthralling, or if you need a game to be linear and easygoing for newcomers, you’d best look elsewhere.